A decision will soon be made by Attorney General Merrick Garland as to whether or not he will appoint a special counsel to investigate the recently uncovered classified documents that Joe Biden had kept at his think tank at the University of Pennsylvania after leaving office.
According to Axios, Garland may assign the case to U.S. Attorney John Lausch, as a special counsel investigation would theoretically remove any potential political bias from Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ). Lausch is tasked with a preliminary investigation that will ultimately determine whether or not Garland assigns a special counsel to the case.
The classified documents were found in a locked closet at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank named for Biden with an office that was frequently used by Biden after he left the vice presidency in 2017.
In response to the discovery, Biden claimed to have no knowledge of the documents’ existence and that he was “surprised” to learn that they had been kept at his center.
“People know I take classified documents, classified information seriously,” Biden said, claiming that he was “cooperating fully” on the matter, and that his lawyers “did what they should have done” by immediately contacting the DOJ and the National Archives.
The incident reveals a level of hypocrisy from Biden, who ordered the FBI to raid the Mar-a-Lago estate of former President Donald Trump in Florida last August, on the suspicion that President Trump was in possession of classified documents from his time as president. Several documents were found, but none were confirmed to have been classified, and the raid earned widespread national and international condemnation for its use of a federal law enforcement agency to target a political opponent. Furthermore, President Trump had the authority to declassify any documents he desired; by contrast, Biden as Vice President had no authority to do so.